My Intro to Creative Writing students leap into generative poetry exercises with great enthusiasm at the beginning of each semester, writing from visual art, lists of their childhood favorite toys and worst teenaged memories, imitations of well-known poems, and objects from their recycling bins or mine. After those joyful first weeks, when I ask my eager students to return to their first drafts and revise, that energy and enthusiasm sometimes drains away.
One student described his attitude on the first day of the term: “I had heard nothing about my poetry other than praise, and thus hadn’t even thought about revising. Why should I?” Even students who agree that revision is essential to completing an essay or a short story can balk when asked to revise their poems.
Early on, I tried a range of activities to encourage revision. I brought in scissors and glue and asked them to cut up and rearrange one another’s draft poems. I asked the entire class to choose the strongest line in each student’s poem, then asked the author to write a whole poem based on that one line. The class noted vague words from a student’s poem and then, as a group, replaced those terms with more precise, sensory words.
Their poems improved, but only slightly. Students submitted “final” poems only lightly tweaked from their original drafts. After several in-class discussions on poetry revision led nowhere, I searched for specific revision exercises. I reviewed my own writing process, polled many poet friends, and leafed through a tall stack of craft books. Most of the two-dozen books I consulted offered minimal help with large-scale revision, focusing on final polishing, or ignoring the subject altogether. Eventually, I gathered a list of fifty-two exercises—one for each week of the year, you might say. Most of these exercises can be found in these excellent books:
Addonizio, Kim. Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. New York: Norton, 2009.
Chapter 22: “Metaphor 1: The Shimmer”
Chapter 24: “A Bag of Tricks”
Chapter 30: “A Poem You Love: Close Reading”
Chapter 34: “Do-Overs and Revisions”
Cohen, Sage. Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry. Cincinnati:
Writer’s Digest Books, 2009.
Chapter 39: “Art of Revision.”
Hayakawa, S.I. Language in Thought and Action. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1939.
Explains perhaps the single most important revision tool: the “Ladder of Abstraction.”
Johnston, Bret Anthony, editor. Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative
Writer. New York: Random House, 2007.
Chapter by Holiday Reinhorn: “Revise, Reenvision, Reinvent.”
I handed out the list of 52 exercises with these instructions: Take this box of tools, place all of them on the desk in front of you, pick up a tool or two, and dismantle your poems. Then put them back together. Tighten some parts; take other parts out; build some new parts. Then, do it again. When you turn in your poetry portfolio, you must include a list, noting which exercises you employed with each poem. You must employ at least five exercises per poem.
Oh, how my students moaned and wailed. I doubted my uncharacteristic prescriptiveness. The rigidity of the assignment scared me as much as it did my students. Two weeks later, when my students handed in their poetry portfolios, many of them complained that revision had made their poems worse. They were wrong. Their poems had improved. Stunningly so.
Most of my students eventually came to agree with me. The first semester I used the 52-exercise packet, one of the strongest poets in the class later wrote to me: “I was shocked to find that I could take pleasure in re-writing my poems. I think this semester is the first time I have ever changed so much as a word in a poem that I’ve written.”
I returned my students’ much-improved poems to them with a small certificate. It listed the “Poetry Revision Olympics Award” each student had earned: overall excellence in revision, widest range of poetic form, most intense focus on one poetic form, best narrative poem, strongest imagery, strongest compression, best use of sound, best use of white space, strongest rhythm, or most powerful embodiment of emotion.
One of the poetry-fearing students, Laura Iamiceli, wrote to me at the end of the semester, and she gave me permission to share her name and words: “I’ve always been really bad at editing papers …. Looking at revision in different ways—like we did for our poem portfolio—gave me more options on how to revise.”
“Poetry is about inspiration,” my creative writing students say at the beginning of each semester, arguing against revision. “Poetry is about a particular moment in time.” True enough, I reply. All that, and much more.
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Wendy Call (she/her) is the author, co-editor, or translator of six books, most recently, Best Literary Translations (Deep Vellum, 2024). A faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program, she lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca City, on Mixtec/Zapotec land.